One of the reasons Deloitte Canada used multiple social media tools to publicize our Predictions launches in Montreal and Toronto was to generate attention. Of course, not all of that attention was favourable. A recent article discussed our efforts: “Using social media is one thing; using it effectively and following through is quite another.” It went on to say that “Starting this kind of two-way conversation is a good thing… [but] the real trick is to continue the interaction. Predictably, this is where Deloitte is failing.”
Yikes—I hate failing! And while I can appreciate the constructive criticism, our first foray into social media felt like more of a success than a failure: the attendance at our various TMT Predictions events was up 50-90% year over year and online page views for the Montreal event were up 900% from the previous year. One media commentator went on about the event and our innovative use of social media, going so far as to say “this ain’t your father’s accounting firm!”
I have since had a chance to reflect a bit more about how large organisations (like Deloitte) can best use social media tools, and think there are three useful lessons learned.
1. There’s No Such Thing as a Cool Rapping Parent
Social media technologies are only a few years old. The first users were classic “early adopters” and justifiably took great pride being at the forefront of a hot new technology trend. Many social media thought leaders are a bit contemptuous of big companies: they say that by ignoring social media we ‘just don’t get it’ and are uncool dinosaurs that will perish when the new era begins.
As with any new tool, experimentation and investigation are needed and that’s what Deloitte did with the Predictions event this year. We do not expect accolades just for the effort, and we expect to learn from the experience. Ultimately, we should use social media because it makes sense, not to seem cool.
2. Small Flaws Can Draw Fire
On the whole, we executed our social media experiment well: links worked, videos played, photos were properly tagged, sites were robust, questions were relayed from online to live, etc. If an individual blogger had achieved that level of professionalism on their first ever social media foray they would be satisfied.
Our first ever social media experiment worked out better than we dreamed it could. Despite that, at least one journalist criticized us for not maintaining the Twitter conversation.
Perhaps we are being held to a higher standard because of who we are. Looking back, I think that is fair. Either we should have kept the conversation going or we should have made it very clear that the social media program was related to a specific event, was going to be of limited duration and would not be maintained until the run-up to the next Predictions event in 2010. Lesson learned.
3. The “Rules” May Be Different for Companies and Individuals
Almost all advocates of social media believe that you must continuously engage your audience in a quasi-real time conversation and those who do not do so “just don’t get it.” Every blog must have fresh posts daily, @tweets must be responded to in minutes, and so forth.
All of which is 100% true for individual journalists or bloggers or marketers. The web 2.0 world is high bandwidth and real time, and success is measured in eyeballs: your audience may be gone in a blink and you can never count on their patience. I am not convinced that the “tweet or die” rule is necessarily true for corporations rather than individuals.
Unlike an individual social media leader or journalist, our revenues are NOT driven by CPMs or eyeballs, but by delivering professional services in a professional way. And let’s face it—some conversations do have a natural end.
The number of Fortune500 companies who have been successfully using social media strategies for the last 2 years is zero. We are all still learning what works best.
So, I believe we can use social media to publicize and broadcast an event - and then continue the conversation in all sorts of other ways. Since the Predictions events I may not have posted any tweets - but many social media folks now are on our email lists, have had coffee with me or are my FaceBook friends.
Even with this blog post, the conversation continues, and Deloitte Canada is still listening…
About the Author
Duncan Stewart is the Director of Deloitte Canada Research in the areas of Technology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT), Life Sciences and GreenTech. He is a member of Deloitte’s national TMT executive team and is a co-author of Deloitte Research’s annual Predictions report on trends in TMT.
Duncan has almost two decades of experience in the TMT industry. As an analyst and portfolio manager, Duncan has provided research or made investments in the entire Canadian technology and telecommunications sector. He has written research on names such as Nortel and Celestica, and been a venture capital investor in Research in Motion among others.